ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on William James’s methodology in his accounts of time-consciousness and self-awareness, emphasizing how his approach to these topics has influenced the predominantly “first-person” methodology of Edmund Husserl and the subsequent phenomenological tradition. It describes Ludwig Wittgenstein’s emphasis on conceptual analysis rather than first-person description, an approach that gives a Kantian tone to his methodology and eventually yields the priority given to the “third-person” approach of the subsequent analytic tradition. The chapter considers Wittgenstein’s account in The Brown Book of how linguistic competence, rather than first-person experience, and provides the key to our sense of time. It aims to provide an analysis of the complementarity of Husserl’s and Wittgenstein’s readings of James. Wittgenstein himself uses the expression “seeing-as” to describe an empirical oddity rather than an invariant structure of perceptual cognition. He refers only to the alternating patterns perceived by subjects presented with pictorial puzzles susceptible of such different interpretations.
